


Finding Sanctuary

by Fata_Morgana



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Deaf Clint Barton, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-15
Updated: 2015-12-15
Packaged: 2018-05-06 21:13:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5430959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fata_Morgana/pseuds/Fata_Morgana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being in love is not the simplest of tasks, at least not for Clint Barton and Phil Coulson.<br/>In the middle of winter, in a remote farmhouse they try to find a way to translate their feelings into happiness and discovers new truths along the way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Finding Sanctuary

**Author's Note:**

  * For [androgynousclintbarton](https://archiveofourown.org/users/androgynousclintbarton/gifts).



There is a light coat of ice at the corner of the bay window in the bedroom and he can see the sky being grey wool soft across the whole of the horizon.  
They have moved in just few weeks before, and it is still a bit of a shock not to see the crowded New York skyline, but the barren, empty fields for miles and miles.

The farmhouse is quiet, the early hour of the morning barely tiptoeing toward 5.30, but he has been awake for a while now, the chill curling goosebumps over his arms and the fragile ugliness of his bare feet. He has been expecting to be joined for a while, because, even if he has yet to make a sound to wake the other man on the bed, he knows that his absence will be calling the sleep away into awareness and will make his solitude end in a strong embrace. Maybe he should feel guilty for knowingly being the cause of yet another early rise from someone who needs sleep more than he does, but love is the most selfish of sentiments, and he cannot help but not wanting to be alone.

He has been alone for too long. 

“Hey…”

 

The word is a silent puff of warmth on the back of his neck, and he shivers hard, the heat of the body behind his own a counterpoint of warmth that encompass the reality of their own relationship.  
He never feels as if all of his heart has thawed, no matter all the heat that Phil has been pouring into him since their first encounter so many years ago.  
His hands are cold, but he grasps Phil’s ones anyway, telegraphing his need in a way that needs no words, in a way that Phil alone can read.  
He turns around so that he can see the soft lines on Phil’s face and, once again, marvels at the fact that Phil not only has stayed, but that, somehow, he has come back to him, time and time again. Not even death has stopped him. 

Phil brings Clint’s cold hands to his lips and the kiss catches on the scabs that run the length of his knuckles, the rusted over blood rough against the soft brittle skin of Phil’s lips. He wants to say something, anything, but all he does is to push his hands harder against the pliable curve of Phil’s lips, and it’s not just a clumsy attempt at offering everything once more, it’s something darker, something that speaks of the the untold belief that one day he will push too hard and Phil will take a step back, will finally say no, will finally send him away.  
This is yet another test, and he hates that he cannot stop himself, that he feels the need to have Phil prove himself yet again, after all these years, after having returned to Clint from six feet under, from a death that Clint had caused. What can Clint ask more of this man? 

And yet he pushes. 

Phil opens his mouth and the graze of his straight teeth tears one of the scabs open, the blood wells up fast to the surface and he licks the coppery, sharp trickle in his mouth, eyes trained on Clint’s face, unwavering in the soft light of the morning. Unwavering, steady in their supporting, understanding, fierce protectiveness. 

The surge in his blood is a familiar one, desire and fear and the absolute necessity to get closer, to slip inside all that steady strength in the attempt to feel safe, to finally feel at home.  
Phil sucks the blood his mouth and the soft lap of his tongue draws crimson across Clint’s finger, tinting the scarred flesh with a colour that breaks the violence of his injuries, turning them into something sweet and bright and hot. He feels the burning heat of desire coiling at the back of his spine and low in his groin, and Phil releases his finger only to bruise a kiss across his chin and on his mouth, surgically precise in finding a way to silence all of Clint’s doubts.  
Clint knows that this is not just Phil trying to find a way to reassure Clint that this reality is not going to disappear, that this will last, Clint knows that not even Phil can promise that. Clint knows that desire, like love, is the most selfish of all beautiful things, but he will not deny Phil, and he will not deny himself the ephemeral reality that, for a moment, for few, long instants, they truly cannot be separated. 

Phil’s hands have lost their heat in the frosted air of a December morning in Iowa, but his mouth is boiling hot, the stunned grace of his kisses is roiling lava on Clint’s lips, and he lets Phil move him towards the bed, against the now cold sheet, the tangled comforter.  
They fall against the bed gracelessly, limbs heavy with desire, and Phil smooths back his hair, which has grown too long in the past months, which needs cutting, but Phil likes it like this, and the simple pleasure of having Phil combing back the long strands has stopped Clint from taking out the clippers. He expects the soft exhales of pleasure against his skin when Phil runs his fingers through his hair again and again, what surprises him is Phil stopping his caress to sign quickly:

“Stay?”

The seemingly simple question feels suddenly like a trap. If Clint promises, he will be responsible for not screwing this up, he will be bound to stay, to not break this absurdly kind man’s heart.  
Can he do this? He really doesn’t know, but God he wants to. He wants this more than he has ever wanted anything. Including having his mama back, and how fucked up is that?  
He moves away from Phil’s embrace, his answer clear in the distance he is putting between the warmth of Phil’s love and the desolation of his screwed up heart.  
Phil doesn’t try to pull him back, doesn’t try to stop him from leaving the bed, but he calls at him with the stable quality of his convictions.  
Phil loves him with the same determination he employs in upholding the law, in the same way he knows what is right and what is wrong.  
He loves him because he knows it’s what his heart needs and what his heart wants. 

“I am not going anywhere.”

Phil’s signing has always been perfect, no particular regional inflection, no abbreviation, just linear, beautifully shaped, clear. He doesn’t want to be misunderstood, he doesn’t want to be misinterpreted, he doesn’t want to give Clint a way out from the truth that, for as long as he is wanted, he will not leave Clint. 

Clint finds it terrifying.  
Even more than the possibility that Phil will leave him. Even more than his own fucked up doubts that maybe Phil is lying, that there is no way for the two of them not to crash and burn. 

Phil signs it again and Clint growls in frustration, his hands on his face, fingers pushing against his eyes. Why is this so hard? Why today? Why?

“You cannot promise me that, Phil. I shouldn’t even want that. I shouldn’t.”

But he does want it.  
He wants it, and the fact that Phil is ready to promise him scares him. It terrifies him because he stopped praying for miracles long ago. He stopped the day social services had taken him and Barney away from that empty home and all the blood in the kitchen. He stopped when Barney had left him for dead in an alley after Trickshot had stabbed him. He stopped when a fucking demi God had speared Phil through the chest and let Clint feel it in all his technicolour glory of blood and guts. 

He clearly doesn’t deserve miracles.

Phil moves across the bed and sits beside him, his hands in his lap, signing slowly. 

“I want to stay. Should not I want that? I want to stay. I want to stay here with you. I want to go out in the world with you. Fight monster or raise horses. Whatever WE want. I want this. I want us. Am I not entitled to want? Aren’t you?”

Clint looks up at the man who has been by his side for the good part of fifteen years, the man who has come back over and over again, the man who has crossed death and life and madness and still wants him. Phil still wants him. Phil still wants a life with him. Brief and bright like a fireball, or long into a quiet retirement of aching bones and crazy memories.

“I don’t know how not be afraid, Phil. I don’t know how to do this without breaking it. Without breaking us. I thought that, after all we had been through, after my fucked up life and you coming back from the dead… I thought that was it. We finally made it through the other side. But the other side is fucking scary, because now… now we got here. We got here and here is good… Here is really good, please believe me.”

Clint turns fully, his eyes a bit wild, his hair falling softly on his forehead, the fragile note in his voice just a notch too loud, and Phil puts a hand on Clint’s heart, the skin cold, the beat a staccato of loud fear. 

“I believe you.”

Clint shakes his head, eyes scrunched shut against the brightness of Phil’s strength.  
“No, no… You don’t understand. I am afraid. I’m fucking terrified Phil. Of everything. Of you leaving, of you staying. Of us making it and of us not making it. I am scared. All the time. All the fucking time.”

Frustration and the bitter taste of fear burn in his throat, and Clint cannot even find the courage to look at Phil until he feels Phil’s finger tracing words on the skin on his arm, two distinct words, traced over and over. 

“Me too.”

When Clint finally looks back at him, Phil signs the words, the fear mirrored in his blue eyes, the lines on his face etched with the story of this fear, of their story, their lives, their love. 

“I’m scared, Clint. I don’t think I will ever be able not to be scared about us. Maybe it’s what being in love is. It’s a constant state of fear of losing what we have finally found. Life has not dealt you the best hand, and I am here because my boss is a crazy bastard, and I am part alien, part crippled, part God knows what. But I am here and so are you. We are here. We made it to here. We made to this place, with this house, this bed, this love. This is us today. Tomorrow we will still be us and until the day when we are not us anymore, for any number of reasons, I will still love you. I will still be afraid to lose you. I will still be jealous of Natasha… Don’t laugh. And Wanda, and Bobby and everyone who had you and did not know how to keep you. And I will always love them all because they didn’t know how, but I do. I do.”

Clint is the best marksman in the world, he can see what many people can’t even begin to comprehend and still, still he had missed this. He had missed the fact that the unshakeable faith that Phil has is not without fear, is not an immovable object, but something that is mired in doubts, but still stands due to the stubborn willpower of a man who could not stay dead when there was good to be done, when there was a man to be loved. 

“You do. You do. You mad man. You do.”

Clint throws his arms around Phil and the chill in the air doesn’t stop the heat that he can feel through Phil’s skin, through Phil’s touch, and he luxuriates into it, burying his nose in the crook of Phil’s neck, tasting the sourness of sweat and the briny quality of his cold skin on his tongue, laving kisses and bites at the tendon of Phil’s neck.  
Phil obliges by craning his neck to give more access to Clint’s suddenly famished mouth and he tightens his hold at Clint’s shoulders, his good hand tracing the hard muscles and the scarred, beloved skin. He brushes words against the tangled mess of Clint’s hair and Clint doesn’t need to be able to hear them to know what Phil is saying, is the same thing that his kisses are spelling on Phil’s skin and they both know that they will still be able to taste those words in each other’s mouths. 

Desire is a simpler language than love, easier to translate but not less scary and, even in their bed, even in this space that they have carved for one another there are so many traps into which to fall and they are still cautious, they are still tentative, blindly looking for the soft spaces without leaving bruises, tracing the edge of pleasure with a gentleness that has been stripped from their daily lives by their jobs, by life, by careless cruelty. 

Outside the window the snow has started to fall again, and the grey sky has turned lead and silver, muting the light inside the room, turning shadows into something softer, taming the cold in silenced whispers. 

The softest of laughter brushes the edge of silence and Clint shakes in Phil’s arms, his cold nose pressed against Phil’s side, his hands, calloused, scarred and strong are stroking Phil, and Phil shivers with cold and with want.  
Phil tips Clint’s chin up and then shapes the words clearly, enunciating slowly, so that Clint can read his lips, so that there is no confusion, no way for the words to be muffled, to be misunderstood.

“Fuck me.”

Clint’s mind flashes back to Steve saying “language” with his outraged, prim voice and he can’t stop a soft puff of laughter. Phil arches an eyebrow, but he doesn’t look offended, just curious, and Clint loves him even more for it. Phil will always roll with the punches, will never assume, will never judge him simply on the basis of how fucked up he is, or how he can’t stop his mouth from getting him into trouble.

“Captain America would be appalled by your language, Phil.” 

Phil snorts delicately, and tackles Clint down on the bed, eyes blazing hot, mouth shaping the words wetly over Clint’s chin.

“Fuck me, love. Fuck me now.”

“Love?”

Phil nods, shameless and unabashed. He smiles and says it again.

“Yes. Love.”

Clint waits for the fear to claw its way back into his chest, but the feeling doesn’t come. And maybe it’s just a momentary respite, maybe he will wake up later,sore and bruised, and fear will eat at his heart again, but right now, with Phil in his arms, with Phil smiling at him, in this house in the middle of nowhere, Clint is not afraid.

He holds Phil’s face in his hands and kisses him soundly.

“Merry Christmas… Love.”

**Author's Note:**

> Some readers will find these two characters rather OOC, and they may be right. These are the Clint and Phil's versions that live inside my imagination and, even if I have used the Phil Coulson from AoS and the Clint Barton from Avengers Assemble and Avengers age of Ultron as templates, they are ultimately my own creation. 
> 
> This story was based on the prompt "Clint first Christmas", and, albeit it lacks the usual settings of a traditional Christmas story, this is my take on the transforming power of love and what better time to feel loved than at Christmas?I hope I have managed to convey this and, I hope that Androgynousclintbarton likes it. 
> 
> Merry Christmas to all of you.  
> 


End file.
